Prepping for my Exam

In the last post I mentioned that I needed to take some more tests. I have to take these tests at an authorized testing center and the closest one is in Mt. Hagen. I was planning on taking my first test on Papua New Guinea Maintenance Air Law in March because the only available testing times before then were in the middle of December and I didn’t feel like studying during the busy lead up to Christmas.

During this time, Nick, one of our pilots, was planning a flight to Australia with one of our floatplanes. It’s going to Cairns to get a new paint job and a new engine. One day Nick and I were chatting and he mentioned he would be stopping at Mt. Hagen on his way to Australia. He could give me a free ride there if I wanted to take my test in December. I quick checked and sure enough, there were open testing slots available! The only problem was that he was leaving in ten days and I hadn’t studied yet.

I decided that, even if I had ten months to study, I’d probably wait until the last week to do it anyway. (Which reminds me of an older post: Procrastination & Motivation) So I paid the fee and scheduled the exam. I set up a folding table and scattered Papua New Guinea aviation literature all over the top of it, like a mad scientist who was infected with a mystery illness and was searching for the cure.

Janice claimed my study methods made her house look cluttered and that I’d had better pass because her house couldn’t stay this way for weeks. So I began to chew through the material like a cow eating hay – that is to say, I would take a bite and then find in indigestible so I’d have to regurgitate it often and break it down into useful information.

Ruining Nick’s Weight Calculations

As it happens here, at least several times a day, our plans changed. I guess I’m partly to blame. Nick had asked me how much I weigh so he could do his magic pilot calculations for fuel and all that. I had given him an optimistic figure loosely based on what our scale in our bathroom had told me two months ago. Imagine my surprise when I weighed myself at the hangar with our fancy digital cargo scale, and found that either I’d gained forty pounds in the last two months, or my bathroom scale was wildly inaccurate – probably a bit of both.

Nick acted a bit shocked too and started mumbling about having to redo all his calculations. Pilots hate weight. I can’t say I’m a fan of it either – unless it’s mine of course, then I’m too fond of it to lose it.

Either by design or by happenstance, Nick’s flight to Cairns got delayed beyond my testing date. I found myself booking a flight with MAF (Missionary Aviation Fellowship). MAF has been around awhile and have employed some famous missionaries, including somebody named Nate Saint. A lot has changed since then, including prices for flights. Suddenly I was bit more invested in passing the exam and a little more worried I wouldn’t do so.

Mt. Hagen

Even though I felt very unprepared for the exam, I was excited to see more of Papua New Guinea. Mt. Hagen is in the highlands and I was excited for a change of scenery from the hot, humid lowlands along the Sepik coast.

We cruised at 10,000 feet in the Caravan and as we flew an hour inland, the ground rose up to meet us in Mt. Hagen which is about 6,000 feet above sea level. We taxied up to the MAF hangar and as I opened the door to the plane I was greeted with a refreshing cool breeze. Ahh! Why didn’t God call us here? I imagine Mt. Hagen is what would happen if you took Alaska and the boiling plot of sand we live on and averaged the two together. It was nice.

While the terrain is nice, Mt. Hagen as a city isn’t anything spectacular, except that they sell Canadian maple syrup and they can grow strawberries! It’s the third largest city in Papua New Guinea. It actually has traffic lights and a stretch of four lane highway. The traffic lights only work when the power is on, which isn’t all that often. Still, they stand as promises that if Papua New Guinea works really hard and really puts in an effort, someday they too could spend their time sitting behind red lights like the Western world does.

My Friend Samy

Samy was my guide in Mt. Hagen. Samy is a German fellow who is an avionics (aviation electronics) technician for MAF. Since none of us at Samaritan have the required licenses to test avionics in Papua New Guinea, we borrowed a guy from MAF to come do some required tests for Charlie, our “newest” floatplane. Samy was that guy.

The locals describe him as a “man blo sutim tok,” or “a man for shooting talk.” In other words, he talks a lot. Samy speaks excellent English that’s sharply punctuated with a distinct German accent. The only other people I’ve met that sound like that are Amish and so my brain tells me this is an Amish in PNG doing avionics work on a plane, which my brain finds a bit startling, to say the least.

To me (a man who struggles to be sociable) being able to talk a lot seems like a supernatural skill. Samy uses his supernatural skill to get himself into and out of a lot of interesting situations.

Now, a month or so later, I was staying at Samy’s place in Hagen the night before my exam. He wandered out into the dining room carrying an armload of books and a worn Zip-loc bag full of flash cards.

“I don’t know if this’ll help but this is some study material some other guys used for their exams.”

In the pile I found a packet of sample test questions from 2013. It was like he plopped forbidden pirate treasure in my lap. While reading through Papua New Guinea air law is like chewing your cud, going through sample questions is like eating cotton candy. It’s much faster and my test was the next day, so I happily started shoveling the answers into my brain, much like a man who just crossed a desert on his hands and knees and has suddenly fallen into a fresh water spring.

Strawberries

Janice had given me a list of things to buy because you can buy a lot of awesome stuff in Mt. Hagen that we don’t have in Wewak. I had found some maple syrup and real chocolate in a store the day before but I didn’t have time to go the market where they sell strawberries. I assumed I would have time to do that.

Unfortunately I was only in Mt. Hagen for a day and half and my exam was the last thing I was scheduled to do there. Since I was pretty insecure about my chances of passing the exam, I spent almost the whole time studying. I assumed I was being responsible by foregoing the pleasures of the world so I could study more. Janice didn’t see it the same way. I got the impression she would’ve been happier if I just put a carton of strawberries on my airplane seat and sent them home instead of me.

“YOU DIDN’T GET ANY STRAWBERRIES?!”

“No, but I did pass my test with an astonishing 82%.”

‘Tis the Season

It was good to get back to Wewak, although it was filling up with people just in time for Christmas. Just like Americans, people here travel home for the holidays too. And since we live in a main travel hub for this area, town has been extremely full.

Crime always goes up this time of year and you have to be on your guard when you’re at and about. Really, though, the only theft we’ve experienced was Oliver stealing all the buttons from the stove and scattering them around the house.

The theft went unnoticed for a little while. Shortly before we discovered the crime, I found myself sweeping the house. This always puts me in a bit of a sour mood. As the kids say, “It’s not fair!” I didn’t make this mess. Well, not most of it. As I gathered up some curious little buttons in the dust pan I thought to myself, “What on earth are those?” I then shrugged my shoulders and, assuming they were from some toy that Elliot dismantled and, deciding it was his own tough luck, I chucked them in the trash.

Then Janice started making supper and gasped. “What happened to my stove? I can’t make any food without buttons!” Suddenly the sightings of mysterious plastic buttons made complete sense.

“I threw them away!” I said.

“Why would you do that?”

I began digging through the trash can and at the very bottom, below all the coffee grounds and smelly diapers, we found every single button that was missing.

I’m super glad we did, because as the holiday season came closer, I don’t think the oven even had time to cool between batches of cookies, cakes, and other goodies.

Bung Kai

Adi, being a typical responsible first born, said to me the other morning, “I don’t think I should eat a cookie today. I had too much sugar yesterday.”

It’s true. We’ve been eating a lot of sugar. This is the time of year when all the missionaries dig out the M&Ms, chocolate chips, Swiss cheese, hot chocolate, and other special treats they brought from Australia or Port Moresby, or had visitors bring with them when they visited, and use them all in one glorious splurge of holiday fervor that begins in early December and reaches a crescendo just in time for our Savior’s birth.

First, all the local missionaries from the six or so mission organizations in Wewak had a “Bung Kai,” or, in other words, “Meeting Food.”

Occasionally there’s a Tok Pisin word that works so well, we replace a bit of our native tongue with the local language. “Bung Kai” is one of them.

At this particular bung kai, we played some games where we made fun of each other for our own mutual amusement. It was all fun and games until I found myself up front on stage singing a short, but impactful solo of “Baby, all I want for Christmas is you.” It was a performance that moved some in the audience to tears.

A few days later we had Christmas bung kai with our Samaritan Aviation team. We had exchanged names and gave each other gifts. We put a spending limit on the gifts, which may have been unnecessary because missionaries are all generally cheap anyway.

Now if you’re like Janice, you’ve stocked up on good quality presents while you were in Goroka or Mount Hagen or Australia months ago, before any sane person was thinking about Christmas. If you’re like me, a last minute shopper, you’re stuck with whatever the stores in Wewak have to offer, typically cheap trade goods from the Chinese Communist Christmas catalog. Christmas for the Communists is purely a financial experience, not a religious one, so they send the good toys to high dollar Western markets. The rest find their way to Papua New Guinea. They’re dirt cheap, but you need to buy them seventeen times in order to get the job done. And all stores seem to sell the same three hundred items. So gift giving needs to involve a little creativity if you don’t want to just hand the same gifts in a circle.

Receiving Gifts

I received a carved wooden pig accompanied by a poem about the three little pigs and Red Riding Hood (who ended up shooting the wolf AND the pigs). I found it rather amusing.

I also received a spandex onesie leotard – kind of like they wear to pedal bikes in France or Americans wear to wrestle in high school. It was clearly designed to fit a vegetarian bicyclist, not the husband of a woman who bakes. It is very stretchy, however, so it’ll accommodate whatever shape you put into it, however aesthetically unpleasing it may be.

Passing of the Leotard

Why did I receive such a tasteless gift, you may be asking? Apparently this tradition started when somebody found the leotard in a thrift store and was so revolted that they gave it to a pilot as a gag gift. The pilot apparently mistook the gift as a dare and showed up to a staff meeting wearing it. He then re-gifted it to the next unsuspecting pilot who reportedly wore it while working on the boat. He then re-gifted it to the next guy. It’s sort of an initiation process I guess. Maybe I’ll wear it to go scuba diving on a deserted island.

Sweat Clothing

You may be surprised to hear we have thrift stores in Papua New Guinea. I was surprised to find them here. They aren’t quite like thrift stores in America, though. They don’t receive donations from the community and then resell them. Instead they buy huge bundles of used clothes from Australia and who-knows-where and then sell them for a profit. The selection varies wildly.

One of the shops has a sign out front that clearly states “Sweat Clothing” and, while it’s not an attractive name, it’s certainly an honest one. Janice said she’s never sweated so much while shopping for clothing before. We have yet to figure out the motive behind the name. Was it a misspelling? Was it joke? We may never know.

Christmas Caroling

One of the ladies here got together a ragtag group of children and adults to go Christmas caroling. After going solo in front of a crowd of people, I figured I had no dignity left to lose. It was a little challenging because we couldn’t just show up on someone’s front porch, what with everyone having fences and security and dogs and stuff. So we would go belt out a song at someone’s gate. Eventually the occupants would stumble onto the porch and wipe their eyes, seemingly stunned to find carolers out and about in Wewak. Much to our surprise they would usually let us inside the fence and allow us to finish a few more songs. They were probably just being polite. Still, besides the sweat, mud on our feet, and mosquitoes slurping our blood, it seemed a bit like Christmas should.

Secret Santa

In the Advent season leading up to Christmas, the kids on base started a Secret Santa thing, secretly leaving crafts or trinkets on the each others doorsteps. The parents pretended to be delighted at each gift, throwing it on top of the growing pile of other homemade crafts and ornaments.

All my secret Santa gave me was a case of impetigo, which is a like a contagious rash caused by a bacterial skin infection. Being in a tropical environment isn’t all ukuleles and getting a tan. More often than not, the tan turns into a sunburn, the ukulele never stays in tune because of the humidity, and bacterial infections thrive on the warm sweat you’re constantly spreading around your face.

Still, considering of all the diseases the bush of Papua New Guinea has to offer, I guess I’ll be happy with this one. (This reminds of a previous post: My Problems Are Fine).

Christmas Morning

But I didn’t let the impetigo ruin my Christmas. The day before Christmas was about 90 degrees so that evening we covered up all the windows and cranked the A/C down until it was as cold as possible. Then Janice made hot chocolate and we sat around pretending it was cold enough to drink it.

We went to bed and woke up Christmas morning to find we had forgotten to turn off the A/C. The night had been cool and so the house was legitimately cold. We all put on sweaters, ate pancakes (with the REAL maple syrup I bought in Mt. Hagen), played a video of a crackling fireplace on our TV in the living room, and opened our presents. Then we made some video calls to family. Our first Christmas in Papua New Guinea was very good.

I hope your family had a good Christmas as well.

Until next time,

Josh